Course Descriptions

We will present some recent developments in syntagmatic grammar (HPSG)
based on empirical phenomena in French and English, on the notion of
construction which can help to understand the system of relatives, and
on the syntax of coordinations and other related phrases (such as
comparative correlatives, like the more, the better or
plus... plus).

Richard Breheny, Dept of Linguistics, University College London
and Napoleon Katsos, RCEAL, University of Cambridge:
Implicatures in Language and Cognition

The course will be in two parts

Implicatures and Grammar (2 classes)

This part of the course will really focus on all aspects of the
question of whether any implicatures are part of the grammar.
We will consider both theoretical and also experimental considerations.

Implicatures and processing architectures

One class to give backgrounds on processing. We will be looking at
what models, architectures are on offer from other areas of language
processing (modular vs constraint based). One class to look at what we
already know about how implicatures are computed on-line and where future
research might go.

Prerequisites : only the rudiments of logic, semantics
and pragmatics are necessary. Any psycholinguistics background would help
but will not be assumed.

Daniel Büring, UCLA : Focus, Prosody, and Syntax

The prosodic structure of sentence S - its phrasing, the location
and choice of pitch accents, possibly other aspects of its phonetic
realization - is determined by at least two factors:
the syntactic structure of S, and the information structure of S,
e.g. which constituents in S are marked as focus, contrastive topic etc.
How do these two factors constrain prosodic structure, and how do they
interact? Is there such a thing as a default / unmarked prosody, and
what is its relation to 'marked' patterns?
These are the kinds of questions we will discuss and try to answer
in this class

Though a certain formal understanding of what focus is is required
to tackle these issues, this class is not about the semantics or pragmatics
of focus marking. It is about the representation and realization of focus,
or put differently, its effects within the computational system and at the
PF interface. I will present a theory of focus representation and realization
(a somewhat eclectic blend which reflects my own preferences) and compare it
to other current proposals.

Prerequisites: This class requires basic knowledge of syntax and
linguistic argumentation; knowledge of either prosodic or intonational
phonology, semantics, and/or focus/information structure is useful, but not
necessary.

I recommend to read the following in preparation to this class:
Büring (forthcoming), sections 1, 2 and 4.2 (available for download at
http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/buring/) ;
Cinque (1993) ;
Reinhart (forthcoming)
;
Selkirk (1995).

Paul Egré: Introduction to Mathematical Logic

The object of this course is to give a general introduction to
mathematical logic to students interested in linguistics, cognitive science,
or philosophy, and for whom the tools and central notions of mathematical
logic can be useful. The course will give a special emphasis on the
metalogical concepts involved in logic, in particular syntax and semantics,
expressiveness, completeness and decidability. I will give elements
of proof theory and model theory. We should cover in particular (the
program is subject to modifications)

Prerequisites: No previous knowledge of logic is required for
this class and the course is adressed in particular to students registered
in the First Year of the Mastère de Sciences Cognitives.

Danny Fox, MIT, Introduction to Logical Form

This class will focus on the study of the syntax that supports
quantification in natural languages. We will look at various arguments that
the scope of quantifier phrases coincides with their syntactic
c-command domain. The empirical phenomena we will investigate includes
Island Phenomena, Antecedent Contained Deletion, Extraposition,
and Reconstruction. If the arguments are successful, various covert
operations need to be postulated, and syntactic theory needs to be developed
to accomodate them. We will discuss possible ramifications.

Adamantios Gafos, Dept of Linguistics, New York University and
Haskins Laboratory: The Nature of Phonological Representations

What is the nature of the mental representations of spoken words?
This course will contrast two broad views on phonological representations,
the symbolic and the dynamical view. In the symbolic view, representations
consist of discrete symbols, mental realities abstracted from phonetic
detail. The major problem under this view is how to related discrete symbols
to the continuity of phonetic substance.
It has been proposed that this relation consists of a 'translation'
from discrete units to continuous physical properties of an
articulatory-acoustic nature. This is the view in the background of most
work in phonology and cognitive science in general.
The other most recent and less explored view, the dynamical view,
admits continuity in phonological representations.
The primary units are spatio-temporal gestures with
continuous spatial dimensions and internal temporal structure.
Here the major problem is: how can continuous representations support
qualitative, combinatorial systems like phonological grammats?
Answers to these questions will be explored by presenting theoretical
and experimental research on different phonological phenomena.

Toben Mintz, USC: Early grammatical learning by infants and word learning by young children

This course will cover two distinct yet related areas in
language acquisition research. The first section will present research on
infants' early sensitivities to structure and patterns in their speech input.
The focus of these lectures will be on the generalizations
7- to 18-month-old infants make, as they listen to speech,
that are relevant for grammatical learning.
In particular, we will discuss children's sensitivity to cues relevant
to grammatical category (e.g., noun, verb, adjective),
as well as infants' discovery of bound morphemes and
morphosyntactic dependencies. Several experimental techniques for
testing infants using natural and artificial languages,
as well as computational techniques for assessing cues to
structure in children's spoken language input, will be introduced.

The second section will cover issues relating to word learning in 2 to 4
year old children, specifically focusing on research concerning how children
learn the meanings of words as they are used in context.

The genetic origins of the language faculty have been a matter of
speculation for decades. With the completion of the Human Genome
Project, it is at last becoming possible to empirically investigate
the matter. We will review the first pieces of data from molecular
genetic studies of developmental language disorders, and take the
opportunity to get into the complexity of the biological processes involved,
dispel any simplistic notion of a "gene for language", and acquire an informed
view about what the genetic contribution to language might be.

G.F. Marcus (2004), The birth of the mind: How a tiny
number of genes creates the complexities of human thought, New York, Basic
Books.

Prerequisites: Some knowledge of biology will definitely help, but is not a pre-requisite, as biology basics will be covered.

Luigi Rizzi, University of Siena:
Issues in Locality and Cartography.

I would like to discuss some questions which arise in the traditional
empirical domain of the Empty Category Principle (subject-object
asymmetries, various kinds of selective extractability from weak islands,
etc.), and which can be address in novel ways by combining insights from
the cartographic studies and from minimalist syntax.

A leading assumption of syntactic theory is that the interpretation
of a phrase or sentence is grounded in its form, i.e. in the feature make-up
of its constituents and the way these constituents are organised (structured).
We shall be more specifically concerned here with the structure and
interpretation of noun phrases. Our aim is to explain their referential
properties - whether or not we associate them with discourse referents,
and when we do, how formal properties guide our semantic construal of
these referents. How may such semantic effects as those commonly known as
'(in)definiteness', 'specificity', 'genericity', 'partitivity',
the 'mass/count' distinction, etc. be derived from morphosyntax?
Haitian (a French-based creole) will provide us with interesting empirical
material for us to explore and analyse. We shall focus on two major
functional ingredients of Haitian noun phrases - the plural marker
yo and the so-called 'definiteness' marker la -
and we shall bring out the general economy of the grammar at work.
Along the way, we shall see through concrete examples how the grammar
of any language (in this case, Haitian) is but an instance of grammar at
large - the grammar of human language: 'Universal Grammar'. Since our
chosen language is Haitian, our study will also lead us to broach the subject
of creolization - how the development of creole grammars should be formally
accounted for from a diachronic viewpoint.